Supports (th)at work

1. Supports th(at) work: Why workplace approaches to intimate partner violence matter

Violence against women is tragically common, with an estimated one in three women globally experiencing physical or sexual violence in their lifetime – and sometimes both (World Health Organization, 2021[1]).1 Across the OECD, almost one in four women (23%) report having experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetime (OECD Family Database, 2020[2]).2 The real number is likely to be higher, given significant underreporting. The consequences of violence can be devastating for those affected, including potential impacts on their health, employment, safety and security, with violence a leading driver of homelessness amongst women (OECD, 2023[3]).

The social and economic costs of this violence are high. Violence can significantly impact victim-survivors’ ability to participate in, thrive at and advance at work, driving significant costs to individuals, businesses and economies. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) estimated the costs of violence against women in the EU‑27 alone to exceed EUR 290 billion in 2019, which includes substantial costs driven by lost productivity and time away from work (EIGE, 2021[4]).3

Tackling violence against women is by far the biggest gender equality priority reported by OECD member countries. There has been a remarkable increase in the prioritisation of violence against women in recent years: almost 9 out of 10 OECD countries (87%) now list violence against women as one of their top three most urgent gender equality priorities (Figure 1), up from 65% in 2016, when the OECD first began surveying Adherents to the OECD Gender Recommendations.4

Figure 1. Violence against women is the top gender equality priority for OECD countries

Share of OECD governments ranking specific policy issues as their first, second or third priority for gender equality, 2024 or latest year available

Note: Responses from 38 countries to the 2024 Questionnaire on Policy Combinations for Gender Equality and/or the 2021 Gender Equality Questionnaire. Responses for eight countries – Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom – were obtained from the 2021 Gender Equality Questionnaire. Respondents selected gender equality priorities from a list of topics based on the OECD Recommendation on Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship. Respondents were able to identify additional priorities which are excluded from the graph, but responses included: undervaluation of women-dominated occupations; gender differences in health, including mental health; worse work-life balance for women, and persistent economic gender inequality.

Source: 2024 Questionnaire on Policy Combinations for Gender Equality and 2021 Gender Equality Questionnaire.

1.1. Workplaces can help tackle the high social and economic costs of intimate partner violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is one of the most pervasive forms of violence against women, and its causes and consequences are far-reaching. Adequately funded, cross-sectoral approaches to prevent and respond to violence are needed to end it, extending to and beyond the education, justice, health, employment and social protection sectors. Employers can play an important role in preventing and responding to violence within the context of these broader societal efforts to end IPV, and ILO Convention No. 190 calls on adherents to mitigate the impacts of domestic violence in the world of work as far as reasonably practicable to do so (discussed in further detail below).

Workplaces offer a unique venue for identification and support for victims-survivors. Workplaces can be a safe place when a home is not one, and colleagues can be well-placed to identify warning signs of violence such as absenteeism, changes in behaviour, and performance‑related challenges.

Workplaces can also support stability and economic security for victim-survivors, which can be critical to leaving and recovering from violent relationships. Leaving abusive relationships can fuel economic insecurity, with some financially worse off following separation (Summers, 2022[5]). Victim-survivors report that employment can be a crucial path to financial independence and economic security alongside many other potential benefits, such as time away from the violence, improved self-esteem and confidence, and contact with valued supports (Alsaker et al., 2016[6]; MacGregor et al., 2020[7]).

While robust evidence on the impact of violence on employment and economic outcomes is relatively scarce, available data shows that intimate partner violence can seriously affect victim-survivors’ economic security, including lower employment rates, greater financial distress and higher reliance on government benefits. Drawing on data from the 2021‑22 Personal Safety Survey, for example, Australian researchers have found a 5.3 percentage point employment gap between women who had experienced (physical, sexual, emotional or economic) partner violence or abuse in the past five years and women who had never experienced violence, with an even higher gap for women subject to economic abuse (9.4 percentage points) (Summers, Shortridge and Sobeck, 2025[8]).

It is important that employers can recognise and sensitively address the workplace impacts of violence, even if that violence takes place outside of the workplace. Surveys with victim-survivors consistently find that IPV affects their ability to stay in, focus on, and/or progress at work, with significant consequences for workers and employers (European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, 2023[9]). National and company-level surveys covering OECD countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Türkiye and the United Kingdom, typically find that the majority of victim-survivors (between 55‑84%) report work-related impacts, with some surveys finding that over 80% of survivors report that the violence had affected their job5 (Opinium Research, 2021[10]; Wathen, MacGregor and MacQuarrie, 2015[11]); Pillinger et al (Wathen, MacGregor and MacQuarrie, 2015[11]), (Pillinger et al., 2019[12]) cited in (European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, 2023[9]), and (Belgian Institute for equality of women and men (IEWM), Western University, DV@WorkNet, 2017[13]; McNicol, Fitz-Gibbon and Brewer, 2022[14]). Some of the most common reported workplace impacts of violence are feeling distracted or finding it difficult to focus, feeling tired or unwell, and low self-esteem/confidence, with knock-on consequences on participation in (and productivity at) work.

A high number of victim-survivors report taking time off work to deal with the impacts of abuse, and – worryingly – some drop out of education and employment altogether. In Australia, in 2021‑22 it is estimated that around a third (34.6%) of Australian working women who experienced violence reported taking time off work because of the violence, with a particularly high rate of leave‑taking amongst women with dependents (41%) and women exposed to more frequent violence6 (66.5%) (Summers, Shortridge and Sobeck, 2025[8]). A 2019 survey in Spain found that 15.6% of women who experienced intimate partner violence were unable to participate in education or employment “for some time” as a result of the abuse, increasing to 21% of those who experienced physical or sexual violence (The Government Delegation against Gender Violence, 2019[15]).

Many victim-survivors completely drop out of the workforce or need to change jobs, with around one in three victim-survivors in a 2022 Australian survey reporting that they were or had been unemployed (18.9%) or that they needed to change jobs (14.1%) because of domestic or family violence (McNicol, Fitz-Gibbon and Brewer, 2022[14]).7 Effective workplace support could provide a triple benefit of helping to keep workers safe and economically secure, reducing the costs of violence to businesses by enabling retention of skilled employees, and reducing the social and economic costs of violence to societies.

1.2. Workplaces play an important role in addressing perpetration

Employers also have an important role to play in addressing perpetration of violence, and addressing violence when it spills over into the workplace. While estimates vary, surveys commonly find that safety risks follow victim-survivors to work, and perpetrators often use work resources or work time to continue the abuse – sometimes intentionally to control or isolate victim-survivors (McNicol, Fitz-Gibbon and Brewer, 2022[14]). Surveys conducted in OECD countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom find that between 16‑58% of those who have experienced abuse have had perpetrators interfere with their ability to get to work, had the abuse follow them to (or near) their place of work, or have been subject to abuse while on work time (Belgian Institute for equality of women and men (IEWM), Western University, DV@WorkNet, 2017[13]; McNicol, Fitz-Gibbon and Brewer, 2022[14]; Pillinger et al., 2019[12]; Wathen, MacGregor and MacQuarrie, 2015[11]). Most commonly these surveys find that around half of victim-survivors report a continuation of the abuse at or near the workplace, at least sometimes.

Workplaces play an important role in ensuring safety in the workplace, and there is significant opportunity for employers to contribute to prevention by addressing the social and cultural norms that enable abuse to take place, and by connecting perpetrators to programmes and supports that could help to stop further violence. Workplace bystander training, for example, has been leveraged to challenge the social and cultural norms that enable abuse to take place, with “bystanders” trained to identify comments and behaviour that could support or lead to violence, and to appropriately intervene (UN Women and ILO, 2020[16]). Trade unions, too, have engaged in awareness-raising on sexism and violence in workplaces, with French Union CGT developing the “Violentomètre,” a visual tool identifying sexist and violent behaviours with grades of severity (CGT, 2022[17]), cited in (Baranska and Picard, 2024[18]). Signposting to appropriate services to prevent harm may also be particularly important given that many are likely reluctant to disclose the use of violence: in Australia, for example, peak body No To Violence operates the Men’s Referral Service, a telephone counselling, information and referral service for men who are or may be at risk of becoming abusive (Australian Department of Health and Aged Care, 2024[19]). Costa Rica reports that within its 911 emergency system, there is a sub-office (managed by the Institute of Masculinity, Couples and Sexuality) which assists men in an effort to prevent violence against women.

1.3. International conventions have increasingly recognised the workplace impacts of intimate partner violence, and the role of employers in addressing them

International conventions have increasingly recognised the economic and workplace impacts of violence, and the unique role that employers can play to address them. While employers’ legal responsibilities vary across countries (discussed in further detail in section 3 below), international conventions have drawn attention to the importance of workplace action on violence against women and domestic violence: Article 178 of the Istanbul Convention calls for Parties to encourage the private sector to participate in the development of policies, guidelines and standards to prevent violence against women, ILO Convention No. 190 requires adherents to recognise and as far as “reasonably practicable” mitigate the impacts of domestic violence in the world of work, while the 2024 EU Directive on Combating Violence Against Women requires member states to ensure that supervisors in public and private organisations receive information about the impacts of violence against women and domestic violence on work, and the risk of third-party violence, such as violence committed at the workplace by the partner or former partner of an employee. Collectively, these instruments also highlight heightened risks of violence for population groups experiencing multiple forms of discrimination and call for countries to take these heightened risks into account.

Growing international recognition has been accompanied by increasing policy innovation across public and private sectors, with companies and governments alike implementing measures aimed at ensuring an effective workplace response to violence, and improving social and economic outcomes for victim-survivors. This policy paper provides a high-level overview of public and private sector efforts to address IPV, with a particular focus on public policy approaches across OECD countries to encourage an effective workplace approach to violence. The focus is on measures that have been implemented to address the impacts of IPV that occur principally outside of work, rather than policy measures which deal with sexual harassment and violence at work.9

Notes

← 1.  Estimated share of women aged 15 years or older who have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, and/or non-partner sexual violence (World Health Organization, 2021[1]).

← 2.  Self-reported lifetime prevalence of physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner, women, 18‑ to 74‑year‑olds.

← 3.  Estimate calculated by estimating the costs of gender-based and intimate partner violence in the United Kingdom in 2019 and extrapolating to EU‑27. EIGE estimated the cost of gender-based violence against women.

← 4.  31 OECD countries responded to the 2016 OECD Questionnaire on Progress in Implementing the 2013 Gender Recommendation.

← 5.  A 2022 survey of 3 002 victim-survivors of domestic and family violence (DFV) who worked in Australia while experiencing DFV found that 84% of victim-survivors reported that their experience of DFV impacted their job (with one in four reporting that DFV significantly impacted their ability to do their job (McNicol, Fitz-Gibbon and Brewer, 2022[14]), while a multi-country study of 4 762 workers of Vodafone across Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Türkiye, the United Kingdom and non-OECD countries (India, Kenya and South Africa) found that 94% of workers who reported having experiencing domestic abuse said that it had negatively affected their performance at work (Opinium Research, 2021[10]).

← 6.  “Exposed to more frequent violence” refers to Australian working women who reported experiencing violence by a previous partner “all of the time/most of the time”.

← 7.  Relates to the share of respondents who reported that their experience of domestic and family violence was an instrumental factor in their current or past unemployment, or their need to change jobs.

← 8.  Article 17 states that “Parties shall encourage the private sector, the information and communication technology sector and the media, with due respect for freedom of expression and their independence, to participate in the elaboration and implementation of policies and to set guidelines and self-regulatory standards to prevent violence against women and to enhance respect for their dignity.”

← 9.  Definitions and understandings of intimate partner violence vary across countries, and measures to address it can be incorporated within efforts to address broader forms of violence, such as domestic and/or family violence. While the focus of this paper is on intimate partner violence, references to broader measures (e.g. on domestic violence), are included throughout this paper, as they typically address intimate partner violence, too. Efforts have been made to ensure that national measures are referred to as they are in their national context.